Beyond Consensus: Weaving the Elephant

We have been taught that for a group to move together, we all need to reach consensus. We spend hours in boardrooms trying to convince the “Snake people” that they are actually touching a “Tree.” We mistake agreement for safety… pero es realmente asi?

But in a world as complex and fragmented as ours, waiting for everyone to see the same thing is a recipe for paralysis. If we wait for total agreement before we act, the elephant will have already moved on.

I want to propose a different quality of attention: Coherence.

The Spiral in the Room

When I facilitate groups, I often see that people aren’t just touching different parts of the animal. They are speaking from fundamentally different value systems.

You might have someone in the room driven by efficiency, metrics, results. Sitting next to them is someone who won’t move forward until every voice has been heard. Usually these two spend the meeting trying to prove the other one is wrong. But a healthy ecosystem needs the drive and the care. A forest needs the fire and the rain.

My work is not about making them agree. It is about asking a different question:
What is your perspective pulling for the whole animal?
What functional necessity does your stubbornness serve?
What are you protecting? What are you seeing that we are not?

When we stop debating who is right and start listening for what each position is protecting, the room changes. Not because we found common ground. Because we found out that the ground was bigger than any of us thought.

The Sanctuary of the Fool

Most teams fail not because they lack talent. They fail because they are too “professional” to mention the rot. They stay safe, they stay agreeable, and they stay stuck.

Thankfully, my Argentine upbringing did not prepare me for politeness (but therapy to kindness ;)). Where I come from, if the food is bad, your tía will tell you. If the plan is broken, someone at the table will say so before dessert. This is not rudeness. This is love that refuses to let you walk out the door with spinach in your teeth. It trusts tthat people will have the maturity and capacity to deal with life.

In The Elephant Sessions, we create a sanctuary for that kind of truth. The “Dangerous Truth”. And I want to be clear: this is not a venting session. It is not a space to dump your feelings on the table and call it honesty. I like to think of it as a.. strategic audit.

The Fool, card zero of the Tarot, is the only archetype that can speak the thing everyone knows but no one says. The Fool has no reputation to protect, no position to defend. When we put on the blindfolds and remove the “Expert” ego, something shifts. We stop defending our part of the elephant and start listening to the pulse of the whole.

This is what I call a safer space. Not a comfortable space. A space where the discomfort is held. Where the naming of what is broken is not an act of destruction but an act of care.

Entonces mis amores - The truth doesn’t arrive politely. But it arrives. And we can hold it.

Differentiated Commitment

At the end of a session, I don’t look for a plan that everyone pretends to like. I look for something I call Differentiated Commitment.

Consensus is everyone agreeing on the path. Coherence is everyone understanding how their different paths serve the same destination.

If consensus is uniformity, coherence is interdependence. In an ecosystem, the mycorrhizal network doesn’t ask the trees to become fungi. It connects what is different so that the whole forest can feed. That is what coherence feels like in a room. Not sameness. Mutual necessity.

This is the shift from “I agree with you” to “I see what you are holding and I trust you to carry it.”

Think about a jazz ensemble. Nobody is playing the same notes. Nobody agreed in advance on every phrase. But they are listening. They are responding. They know what key they are in and they trust each other to take the solo when it’s theirs. That is coherence.

Last December, on a weekend retreat at Emerge Lakefront, I gave a group of people strings tied to a globe. Each person was asked to pull from the angle they believed was right. At first it was chaos. Strings crossed, tensions clashed, the globe wobbled. But as they listened to each other’s pull, as they adjusted without letting go of their own thread, something happened.

The globe lifted.

Nobody agreed on the angle. Nobody moved to someone else’s position. The world rose because of the tension between them, not despite it. That is what I am building toward in every room I hold.

And this builds something deeper than a strategic plan. It builds an embodied confidence that we can stay together and stay creative even when the map is gone.

The Weaving

We are living through a metacrisis that none of us can solve alone. We need the activists, the bankers, the poets, and the technologists. Not because they agree, but because they don’t.

I didn’t survive a conservative upbringing and a “marginalized” diagnosis by finding a middle ground. I survived by finding the audacity to weave my own reality out of the constraints I was given.

Your team doesn’t need to be the same. It needs to be coherent.

Empieza. Start. Con miedo y coraje pero mar adentro!

Quest for this week: Identify one person you fundamentally disagree with. Instead of trying to change their mind, ask them: “What thread is your perspective pulling?” Don’t argue. Just listen. Share what happened in the comments.

The Elephant is a monthly salon held at Emerge Lakefront, Stockholm. If you want to be part of it, subscribe to this Substack or visit daramorgana.com.

Dara Morgana designs experiences that help groups hold what is difficult together, and supports people through one on one sessions.

As an artist and a person who at first glance is quite self expressive, and at ease with it, I often hear “I wish I was that creative, I wish I could do x and y and z...” And when I hear that, besides feeling a bit frustrated, what I feel is a sense of... if you wanted, you would.

While provocative that may sound, I say it as someone for whom creativity was never a luxury. It was a survival mechanism.

I grew up in a very conservative, rigid upbringing that didn’t leave much room for the Fool or the Artist. I grew up with Neurofibromatosis 1, a genetic condition that comes with its own set of physical and learning challenges. In school, the diagnoses were clear: I was told I would be a “marginalized social” case. Someone who wouldn’t fit. Someone who might end up homeless.

When I arrived in Germany with 20 euros in my pocket and a brain that worked differently than everyone else’s, I didn’t have the “gift” of inspiration. I had the necessity of invention. And that necessity taught me something that has shaped everything I do since: creativity is not something you wait for. It’s something you build. Con las manos. With your hands, with your mistakes, with whatever you have in the room.

I do believe creativity is something inherent to all of us, but that it has as multiple and creative ways of expressing itself as the concept itself. Living as if creativity is a holy nectar reserved for only a few, the artists, is a disservice to every single person on the planet, and to the planet itself. And it enables a sense of victimhood that I think we can no longer afford.

Creativity is for everyone. But creativity and agency go hand in hand. Creativity is a way of living in the world that demands the deconstruction of certain aspects of socialization and conditioning. It asks you to unlearn before you can make.

Last week I wrote about the elephant The crisis so big none of us can see it whole. And if that’s true, if we are indeed living inside something vast and incomprehensible and urgent, then we need every single person’s creative capacity online. Not just the painters. Not just the poets. Yours. The way you problem solve. The way you hold a difficult conversation. The way you raise your kids or run your team or reimagine what your community could be. That is creative work and we need to start calling it that.

So the question becomes: if creativity is a consequence, a consequence of what? What are the conditions? What do you actually practice?

I want to share some things that have helped me, and that I’ve seen help others in my workshops and facilitation work. Not as a formula. As an invitation to experiment.

Work with limits, not against them

Something I’ve noticed, both in my own practice and when I facilitate groups: we think creativity needs freedom. Blank canvases. Unlimited everything. But it’s actually the opposite. Creativity wakes up under constraint. Give yourself a thousand options and you freeze. Give yourself three and suddenly you’re inventing.

I think about this with my own body, my own history. The NF1 and the learning disabilities I was handed. For a long time I saw them as walls. Things to overcome, to push through, to apologize for. But eventually I realized they were the container. A bonsai grows inside the constraint of its pot. It becomes what it is because it has to negotiate with its limits, not despite them.

I run an exercise in my workshops where I give groups an almost impossible limitation and ask them to design something with it. Every time, the same thing happens. They start frustrated, trying to get around the constraint. And then something shifts. They stop fighting it and start using it. And what comes out is always more interesting than what they would have made without the limitation.

The question I keep coming back to, in my work and honestly in my life, is: where is the gift hidden inside this limitation? What abundance already exists here that I’m not seeing because I’m too busy being frustrated?

The budget that’s too small. The time that’s too short. The body that hurts. What if those are not obstacles to your creativity but the very material it needs?

Where is the gift hidden inside this limitation?

Listen to what is there

There’s a quote attributed to Michelangelo. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” I come back to this all the time. Discover. Not impose. Listen to what the marble already wants to become.

I think most of us, myself included, walk into rooms and projects and relationships already knowing what we want them to be. We’re not listening. We’re projecting. And then we suffer when reality doesn’t match.

Creativity lives in the gap between what you expected and what showed up. In the willingness to say: this is not what I planned. Bueno. What IS this? What wants to happen here?

This is probably the hardest practice on this list. Es lo más difícil que hay. Because it asks you to let go of your idea of how things should be and actually pay attention to how things are. And that requires a kind of humility that our egos really don’t enjoy.

Embrace the fool

In the tarot, the Fool is card zero. Not one. Zero. The card before the journey even begins. The one who steps off the cliff, not because they’re stupid, but because they are willing to see something nobody else is seeing yet.

I think about this a lot. How every creative act requires a moment of looking ridiculous. Of saying the thing that might be wrong. And how much creative intelligence gets murdered every day in meetings and boardrooms and organizations, simply because the room doesn’t feel safe enough to be dumb in.

I’ve been the fool many times. It has cost me things. But I also know that every single important thing in my life started with a moment where I looked ridiculous to someone. So I keep choosing it. Not because I’m brave but because the alternative, staying safe and small and agreeable, is more expensive in the long run.

Most important things in my life started with a moment where I looked ridiculous to someone ;)

Be disciplined in the audacity to follow the impulse

To see the house in a single stone. To hear the whole melody in one note. To trust that the thread you’re pulling is connected to something, even when you can’t see where it leads.

This is not talent. This is la audacia. The willingness to follow the spark before you can justify it with a business case or a five year plan. “La suerte es amiga de la accion” they say, Luck is friends with action.

A seed doesn’t know what tree it will become. But it grows anyway. I think there’s something important in the word discipline here. Not reckless spontaneity. Disciplined audacity. Following the impulse with commitment, with rigor, with your whole body. Not just enthusiasm that burns out by Thursday.

Mistakes are information

In a creative process, there is no failure. There is only feedback. The paint dripped. What does that tell me? The plan fell apart. What can I see now that I couldn’t see before? The relationship ended. What was I not listening to?

I think this is where creativity and resilience become the same thing. When you practice treating mistakes as information with a paintbrush, you are training yourself to do it with your life. With your team. With your organization. With the falling apart of things you loved.

This is the practice I come back to most in my 1-1 creative catalyzer work. People come in thinking they’re stuck or broken or failing. And so often what’s actually happening is that something is trying to tell them something and they haven’t slowed down enough to listen to the feedback.

Underneath all of it

All five of these practices have something underneath them. A foundation I’ve been trying to name for years.

I call it secure attachment to the process.

In psychology, a child with secure attachment doesn’t never fall. They fall, and they trust they can get back up. They cry, and they reach out. Secure attachment isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the confidence that you won’t be destroyed by it.

I want to stretch that idea. Because I think we need it at a scale much bigger than individual psychology.

Entienden a donde voy? We live in very interesting times. And I think most of us are responding to the intensity of this moment in one of two ways. Either we shut down. Avoid, numb, scroll past, look away. Or we go the other direction. Anxious, doom scrolling, consuming more and more information as if knowing more will somehow make it hurt less. EEven both sometimes.

Avoidant or anxious. Both are responses to a broken sense of trust. A feeling that the ground is not solid. That life will not hold us.

Avoidant or anxious. Both are responses to a broken sense of trust.

And honestly it makes sense. Because the systems we were told would hold us, political, economic, institutional, they’re not holding. Not the way we need them to.

But here’s what I want to offer. And I offer it not as someone who has figured it out but as someone who practices it imperfectly every day. The answer is not to fix our attachment to those systems. It’s to build something different. A secure attachment to the process. To life itself. To our own capacity, and each other’s, to meet what comes.

Not naive trust that things will be fine. But a practiced, embodied confidence that says: I can be with this. I can stay creative inside of this. I am not alone in this.

That’s what creativity actually is, when you strip away the galleries and the genius myths and the creative departments. It’s the capacity to make meaning when meaning has collapsed. To find the next step when the map is gone. To compost what is broken into soil for what comes next.

You already know how to do this. You have been doing it your whole life. You just weren’t calling it creativity.

Empeza :)

Start.

Quest for this week:

What constraint in your life right now might actually be your best material? Not the thing you’re trying to remove or fix or escape. The thing that, if you looked at it with different eyes, might be pointing you somewhere you wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

Name it in the comments. You don’t have to solve it. Just name it.

I’ll go first.

Dara Morgana is an interdisciplinary artist, creative facilitator, and TEDx speaker. She is Artist in Residence at Emerge Lakefront, Stockholm, where she runs The Elephant salon series, team workshops, retreats, and 1-1 creative catalyzer sessions.
Find her at daramorgana.com

You are in a dark room. You can sense other people around you, but you cannot see them. You cannot see anything. The only thing you know is that there is something in the room with you, something large, and that everyone is touching it.

You extend your arms. Your hands meet something solid. It feels long and thick, wider than your legs, rough to the touch. The texture reminds you of bark. Your brain does what brains do: it reaches for what it knows. It contracts around a shape. It names it.

This is a tree.

You are sure of it. You can feel it. You have climbed trees, leaned against them, watched them grow. This is a tree.

But then you hear the person next to you say: “This is a snake.”

A snake? You almost laugh. How can they possibly think this is a snake when it is clearly, obviously, undeniably a tree?

Someone else: “It’s a fan.” Another: “It’s a wall.” Another: “It’s a rope.”

For a while, you argue. You raise your voice. You build a case. You form alliances with the other tree people. You start to distrust the snake people. You question their intelligence, their motives, their capacity to feel what is right in front of them.

You might even write a long post about it.

Sound familiar?

The thing in the room is an elephant.

Everyone is right. The trunk feels like a snake. The leg feels like a tree. The ear feels like a fan. The side feels like a wall. The tail feels like a rope.

Each person is touching something real. Each person’s experience is valid. And not one of them has the whole picture.

The metacrisis is the elephant

We are living through what some call the metacrisis. Climate collapse, democratic erosion, technological acceleration, epistemic fragmentation, institutional decay, an epidemic of loneliness.

These are not separate problems. They are different parts of the same elephant.

The economist touches the leg and says the crisis is structural. The therapist touches the trunk and says it is relational. The activist touches the tusks and says it is political. The technologist touches the tail and says it is a design problem. The mystic touches the belly and says we have lost connection to something deeper.

Each of them is right. And the argument between them generates more heat than understanding.

We keep collapsing complexity into single answers. We keep choosing sides in a world that is asking us to hold more than one thing at once.

The no man’s land

I have spent the last decade in a kind of no man’s land.

Too artistic for the systems change crowd. Too conceptual for the art world. Too spiritual for the institutional funders. Too grassroots for the corporate clients. Too Latina for the Nordics. Too nomadic for the rooted.Too rooted for the nomadics.

For a long time I thought that was a problem. I kept trying to pick a lane, to make myself legible to one world at a time. It never worked.

Because I am not from one world.

I left Argentina at 17. I almost became a Christian nun to support Pope Francis. I have lived in 13 countries and more than 30 cities. I have spent time deep inside religious institutions and deep inside hippie communes. I have slept in chateaux and in tents. built governance structures in intentional communities, performed aerial poetry in forests, facilitated conflict in co-living spaces, supported humanitarian programmes across Latin America, spoken on TEDx stages across Europe, and sat with indigenous communities in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia.

And what I have come to understand is that each of those worlds is touching a different part of the same animal. The systems thinkers have one piece. The artists have another. The community builders, the somatic practitioners, the indigenous knowledge holders, the technologists, each of them is holding something real.

And the spaces where those worlds overlap, the messy, illegible, in-between spaces?

That is where the shape of the whole elephant starts to become visible.

I am not an expert on one part of the elephant.

I am someone who has been moving between the parts for long enough to sense the shape of the whole animal.

That is not a weakness. That is the qualification.

Because the elephant does not need more specialists who know their part perfectly. It needs people who can move between the parts. Who can sit with the person touching the trunk and understand why they are sure it is a snake, and then walk to the person touching the leg and understand why they are sure it is a tree, and hold both without choosing sides.

People who can translate between worlds because they have lived in enough of them to know that each one contains a piece of something real.

I have watched brilliant, well-intentioned people tear each other apart because they could not hold the possibility that the person next to them was touching a different part of the same animal.

In communities. In organisations. In movements.

I have watched it in myself. I have been the person yelling about the tree.

What I have learned, slowly, painfully, and mostly through getting it wrong, is that the most important skill of our time is not having the right answer. It is the willingness to stay in the dark room long enough to realise that you are only touching one part.

The Elephant

I have been developing something called The Elephant.

In January I ran the first experiment at Emerge Lakefront in Stockholm. A room full of people. A blindfold. A 3 meter gigantic Elephant. A question that nobody in the room agreed on. And a practice: staying present with the disagreement long enough for something none of us expected to become visible.

I am still developing it. Each iteration teaches me something about what happens when people are asked to feel rather than argue, to stay rather than resolve, to hold rather than collapse.

What I can tell you so far is that something shifts in a room when people stop trying to prove which part of the elephant is the real one. Something opens. Not consensus. Something more useful than consensus.

A willingness to act together without requiring agreement.

My work now is to understand and be with different parts of the elephant. To keep moving between worlds. To keep designing spaces where the whole animal can become visible, even briefly, even imperfectly.

The future will not belong to the people with the best answers.

It will belong to the people who can hold the most complexity without breaking. The ones who can stay in the dark room. The ones who can feel the trunk and the leg and the ear and the tail and say:

I think this might be an elephant.

And then do something about it together.

Welcome to The Elephant.

This Substack is the new home for my work. It is a space for those of us living in the “no man’s land” between systems and soul, between art and action. For those who hold parts of the Elephant, and want to listen and weave with other arts.

Moving forward, I’ll be sharing dispatches from my experiments in collective complexity, like the one pictured above at Emerge Lakefront, and tools for navigating a world that no longer fits into simple boxes.

I’m so glad you’re here in the room with me.

Dara Morgana
<dar amor gana>
www.daramorgana.com

>

Dara Morgana designs experiences that help communities hold what is difficult together. She is based at Emerge Lakefront, Stockholm.

Subscribe for more from The Elephant.

What role and priority does play have when challenging situations arise?

How do you design your response and integration to change?

A few years ago, I found myself screaming and crying in a forest in Brandenburg, Germany, after receiving a very challenging diagnosis. Not only did I have NF1 - a genetic mutation that causes tumors to grow around the nerve endings - and needed to have three tumors removed, but one of them had a very high possibility of being cancer.

I was appalled, to say the least. I had just turned 25, had barely arrived in the country with only 20 euros, my career as an artist was just starting, and the sweet lure of the Berlin summer was upon me. I was not in contact with anyone from my blood family except for my father and was dealing with most of it on my own. Tumors were hard enough to handle, but cancer? Where would I fit it all in?

What was I going to do? How would I manage to not die inside?

I knew rationally that I could do it, show up, do the things, and ideally not die right away. But what about my inner world, and my quality of life? How was I going to integrate this whole mess into the beautiful life that I had started curating?

I realized that it was not the diagnosis itself that frightened me, but the “usual” ways sickness is dealt with - serious, cold, empty of play, and full of pain. The gasps of pain and worry when I would share the news, the pity that would marinate people’s voices….I cried for a bit more until I got tired and sat by a tree. I was feeling powerless, in a spiral of stories and fears about a future that I could not control. I was a victim of monsters that fed on helplessness and victimhood. I could not afford to miss more life. I did not want to miss more life. So, calling upon my deep desire, I decided that what would determine my life and this story was how I walked my walk. My power was not in a road that I could not control, but in my steps, my intention, and my action. In my character, the genre I was going to write this into is the odyssey that my life was. My life had been a song of love, courage, playfulness, resilience, and creativity - and this would not be the exception. I looked to my left and saw a piece of bark with three holes in it, and to my right, a long stick. In front of me, my feet, one of the shoelaces untied. I took it off to bond the two pieces together. I took the deepest breath I could muster and I commanded it to be my Magic Stick because it was filled and basked in the power and determination of my heart. I named it Hope because that is what I brought to the situation, it was intended to help me walk in my weakness. A very tangible expression of the metaphors that were taking space in my inner world. Just like in a hike, while the trust is on my legs and core, a walking stick can be incredibly helpful when it comes to more tricky hikes. Hope was temporal support.

I took it to every hospital appointment I had that year, and I reached out and held it every time life got hard(er). I knew I could do without it or need it, but being able to choose, and allow myself to have it, changed my life and the quality of it. It opened doors to connection and softness and brought color and play to cold white walls. It fostered love and magnetized questions and curious conversations.It created a tender, positive space in a place of tension. It allowed me to remember that there is so much more than the walls of sickness and that even in that there is space for life to blossom beyond the blood test, diagnoses and

It invited me to test the courage in my belief and self-expression - German hospitals are not the most charming warm places ;) - and bring vulnerability and a dash of mischief to play in places where it’s usually not allowed. To create a bit of sweet, artistic chaos that would hopefully help others question how we understand the healing process. It is not that I believe that everyone should make a magic stick and heal with a diversity of colors and play, but I do believe there is a version of the play in everyone’s language. That place of play is an oasis, a well that can renourish and revitalize us in the journeys we take.

By creating intentional spaces and behaviors of play, we enter a flow state. In that flow state, creativity, and regeneration occur. The way we experience and wire the situation in our brains becomes less traumatic and it fosters self-love, confidence, and a deep sense of well-being.

Playing in today’s world can come off as escaping reality, not taking ownership, and being irresponsible - and I experienced that judgment firsthand. But for me, when we come from a place of acceptance - shit happens to everyone at a certain time - creativity and play are essential to make the best out of it. It helps us compost that shit and make fertile soil so new things can grow. Rebel against the dogma of suffering and meet others from a place of gratitude for their service.

With this experience, I realized that creativity and playfulness are not only helpful but essential for resilience. They help us move beyond the limits of our rational minds and connect with our inner child, the part of us that is unafraid to explore and try new things. In this way, creativity and playfulness become a kind of superfood for our resilience, giving us the energy and motivation to face even the most challenging situations.

I invite you, my dearest reader, to reflect how does your play look like.

Where would you like to bring it?

How will you integrate it into your next design when change comes?

Remember to give yourself permission. I know that we get so caught up in our responsibilities and obligations… but make a conscious effort to give yourself permission to play, whether that means taking a break to doodle, dance, or daydream.

Trust yourself and embrace uncertainty: Play is all about exploring the unknown and trying new things. Embrace uncertainty and allow yourself to be open to new experiences and ideas. You’re strong enough for the unknown.

Find your playful ecosystem: Seek out environments and people that embody playfulness and creativity. This could mean joining a community theater group, attending a creative writing workshop, or simply spending time with friends who bring out your playful side.

By cultivating creativity and playfulness in our lives, we not only enhance our resilience but also create a more joyful and fulfilling existence. So, the next time you face a challenging situation, consider how you can infuse it with a sense of playfulness and creativity. Who knows, you may just find that the experience becomes a source of growth and transformation, rather than a source of pain and suffering

With heart, courage and a playful ROAR,

Dara Morgana
<dar amor gana>

I still remember the disbelief when I opened my email in mid-2019 to find the first message, or “modern correspondence” as she called it. My grandfather’s sister, who had been mad at the family for years, whom I didn’t even know existed, had decided, at 94 years old, to break her no-contact and reach out to my dad (her nephew) after 40 years.

I met her (online first, and later in person) with the same curiosity that the pilot stranded in the desert met the little prince- where had she come from? Where had she roamed? Why did she leave...and return? Who was she?

I found out she was born near Mannheim, Germany, in 1924, and thanks to my grandfather, she escaped the Nazis and came to Argentina in 1936. Her life, like mine, was shaped by a quest for freedom, independence, adventure, connection, and travel as a response to exile and trauma.

When she disconnected from her family and went no-contact, for reasons I have yet to fully understand and probably never will, the world rose up to meet her, and a family built on love embraced her. They are still by her side today, and as she began last Friday to approach the doorstep of death, I really, really wonder... what was alive in her during those years?
Was she curious? Did she feel abandoned? Did she numb herself? Did she want to reach out but did not know how? Was she waiting for an invitation that never came? Did she try to master herself before returning, thinking that only then she would be enough? Was she scared? Did the emotions tied to returning overwhelm her? Or did she finally get tired of listening to fear and decide to give it another try? Was she afraid of not being welcomed, but did it anyway?

These are questions, in all honesty, that I’ve asked myself for years in terms of my own exile and still ponder with a more attentive curiosity when mirrors like this come by.

We exchanged emails for four years. She would tell me about her adventures, past lovers, intellectual conversations, career, and travels. She spoiled me with words of encouragement to pursue my heart and independence, but without forgetting to also surrender to pleasure and romance. I never managed to ask, in the right way, the root of her pain, to hear about the earthquakes that had made her mountains and sharp edges. For a while, I blamed it on generational differences, where there is a counter-movement now rising to create belonging in the places shame once inhabited.

Last 2024, when I went to Argentina, I had the blessing not only to meet her but also to spend her 100th birthday with her. A century alive on this Earth. One hundred rings of life for her incarnation. Seventy years between us- but also 25, because it was only in the last five that we grew in each other’s hearts. She would ask me again and again to put my hand next to hers, and through that contrast, marvel at how much life she had lived, and how much there was still left for me to live.

Beyond the reflections and the gratitude for life, and the privilege of being held by the world when blood family isn’t available, what burns deeply in me is the desire to cultivate spaces and tools for hard conversations. To create regeneration, so many years don’t pass with life missed.
Maybe I am greedy, but I can’t help thinking that while there was a “happy ending” (a resolution where we all hugged and told each other we loved each other), I feel grief for not having had more time to enjoy her. That there were moments in my life without her in it, and moments in hers without me.
I wonder how my life might have been shaped and nurtured by having her around when I was a child, or even more importantly, as I stepped into the world alone as a young woman, searching for mentors who could guide and hold me. I wonder how her life would have been shaped with even more family in it.

And yet, I understand that she did what she could to keep herself safe. Her choice was 40 years of no contact. Both of these reflections make sense to me now. There is immense wisdom in celebrating what was, and using the “what if” I projected onto her story to question my own path. But the difference is, I don’t need to repeat that story.

I can learn from her, from the choices she made, and the pain she carried, and do things differently. I’ve already built a life that feels good, one filled with love, adventure, and belonging. I don’t need to go back to where I was hurt, but I can continue her work in a new wayone that creates healthier connections and more room for love, before so much time is lost. In a way, that’s when we really met: when I realized I could continue what she started, but with more softness, more healing.

Now that I know I am safe in myself, that I am my own person, and that I have the life I want... I am curious to re-explore. To not let life pass by, to soften, and to create intentional time to open doors, windows, and even post boxes to let the younger generations in.
To let my nieces and nephews, and the children of family, know that I’m here, and that I welcome them with open arms.

And here is where the real adventure begins: not just in reconnecting with others, but in making sure the spaces we create for connection are wide open, now and always, so that love and belonging don’t wait 40 years to find their way back.

Regeneration, to support the heart and the next generations—without the need to carry the weight of the past.

With love and courage,

Dara Morgana
<dar amor gana>